Backslash is delighted to announce the gallery’s first solo exhibition of work by the artist Thomas Lévy-Lasne. In the new show, references to classical painting rub shoulders with an unquestionably contemporary choice of subjects.By working with a great variety of media – oil on canvas, watercolours, pencil and charcoal in small-scale formats as well as monumental works – Thomas Lévy-Lasne uses his artistic mastery to place every day’s banality in a new light. The exhibition title, Fragility, is a reflection, as subtle as a perfume’s trace, of the tragic nature of today’s times, of the new world we have to adjust to.

The show invites viewers on a journey via the different artistic techniques offered by figurative art.

Oil on canvas appears in a wide variety of formats and subjects. Largescale compositions with operatic details, a luxurious landscape, a framed busy figure on his smartphone, a woman on the balcony of a modern building amid a multitude of other buildings. Landscapes, such as a sunset tainted by artificial colours, and portraits, such as the serious-faced little girls dressed up as princesses, revive the painterly pleasure of dignified draping. A serie of canvases depicts the humility of various manual jobs. Concentration, sensitivity, instinct for the right move are all concerned here, and all unreachable to machines.

A brand new series of charcoals features images in dense yet hazy black tones, the special liquid fixative technique serving to blur the artist’s extremely precise lines. A vast forest entices viewers in, submerging them physically in the perspective of its foliage. The agitation of demonstrations contrasts with the venerable calm of trees and Haussman buildings. Bodies offer themselves up in the intimacy of confined urban spaces.

The serie of party-themed water colours paints a portrait of a as festive as fragile generation. Confetti, beer cans and plunging necklines become iconographic vanitas viewed from an alcohol-imbued perspective that indiscriminately portrays the carnival of textures and motifs.

Witness of this era, Thomas Lévy-Lasne also creates pencil drawings of scenes inspired by a pornographic website which streams live footage of non-professionals having sex. Magnifying the sexuality’s tenderness and intimacy, its scandalous and comical nature, he employs his pencil with delicate hatching and soft strokes that correlate to a subject monopolised by the porn industry.

As Klaus Spiedel explains: “Whether depicting a sunset or an orgy, his works consistently seek to share with us the enormous appetite for appearances that characterises Thomas Lévy-Lasne’s artistic practice.”